Crow (Part Nine)

[Douglas Mercer]

Douglas Mercer
December 1 2024

Continued From Crow (Part Eight)

You might not have heard of the Sargasso Sea but you’ve probably heard of the Bermuda Triangle. Storms from multiple ocean currents around this part of the mid-Atlantic have reportedly destroyed hundreds of ships and planes which have vanished into thin air. But while the Bermuda triangle is actually an urban legend the mysterious patch of water known as the Sargasso Sea harbors real life miracles of nature. The Sargasso Sea is, unusually, bordered by four ocean currents and has no shores. It is notoriously difficult to navigate, due to the four currents that surround it creating a clockwise-circulating system of currents. Boats can be stranded there on preternaturally calm seas. It is also the ocean that separates the Caribbean from England.

That bit about the appointment in Samarra amuses me now, you see the figure of Death and go out of your wits and flee; only to run into the arms of Death. Those old guys, I tell you, they knew a thing or two and I speak now from personal experience. I was now well across the Equator and through the Doldrums and met the North-East Trades; it was smooth and plain sailing then and I could leave the Teignmouth Electron under jib and mizzen and make leisurely but steady progress in the weed and flotsam and jetsam filled waters of the by now fabled Sargasso Sea. I hope I add to the store of lore, because trust me this will be one for the books, and I intend to lay it on thick.

The transmitter problem was daunting, I tore up the Marconi Kestrel and saw that it was beyond hope of help. Never at a loss I came up with an even grander idea, for I had on board a small Shannon radio/telephone that was designed for short wave communication on a medium bandwidth or wavelength. I set about modifying this little beauty (truly a marvel of human ingenuity) to enable it to transmit Morse at Long Range on a short band—it was quite audacious really to translate and transform totally the nature of this little transmitter. I had to redesign and rebuild whole stages of its circuitry, mixing up transistors and valves, mercilessly and ruthlessly cannibalizing crystals. I had a mass of components on board but no manuals, textbooks, or test equipment which is generally required for basic developmental work. But no matter, I had pored over so many of these that it was all in my head by this point and I could do it by memory. I bragged to my wife once that someone could wake me up in the middle of the night, at gun point sit me down at my desk, and I could regurgitate the entirety of anything to do with communication devices. She told me I ought to write a book and I had certainly planned to. But now that I have become a broadcaster it seems beside the point. I have other fish to fry now as might be said.

I did have to build my own test instruments from the ground up and I had to work them out from First Principles. This would be a chancy undertaking in any environment but in a rolling and swaying and decaying cabin the size of small cubicle it created dangers all on its own. If there was too much jarring of commotion caused by the waves I was likely to electrocute myself with not a soul around to extricate me from the live wires of the bits and pieces; however I was steeped in the practice of messing around with high voltages. In my younger days I became obsessed with high powered transmitters. I dislike getting shocked as much as the next fellow but it is an occupational hazard that one must stoically endure. Over time indeed I built up a kind of tolerance for it though, I must say, when one is on one’s own things can be very different.

After a couple of days in this endeavor the cabin looked like a cyclone hit. There were five Tupperware boxes spilling their brims, all of it loaded to the gills, breakfast debris, empty cans everywhere, 12 tins of steak, 24 of milk, 30 pounds of cheese, all of it littering and strewn about the cabin floor. There are the various innards, viscera and guts of abandoned transmitters lying helter skelter all over the lot; a too much worked over transmitter from the Marconi Kestrel lies in a vain and inglorious heap. And then of course there is the Shannon disgorging its contents on the work tables. A fair old state of chaos it is.

It was hot as hell as well. We were nearing the Summer Solstice (eight days off) and at mid day the Sun was vertically overhead. I rigged up a little wind funnel to channel air into the cabin but it remained intolerable. I would not have been the heroic picture of the books but a strange naked little creature branded by the Sun red all over and as they met in Teignmouth to prepare the festivities of my soon to be Triumphal Homecoming I knew they were in for rude awakening, but then so are we all and my only advice from this self created eyrie is to get it over with quick.

You see there is a cosmic game going on but it is reaching the finale. And the only thing that matters is the truth. Early on the main thing I kicked myself for was neglecting so many things I had happened across. I read Nietzsche and was impressed for sure, him and Shaw had it correct abut that bit about the Coming Race, they were right on the money. And beyond Good and Evil is right as well, for nothing is real that does not last forever. But even with the masters you need to do a small amount of editing for all is not perspective, and truth is the only thing that matters and the Truth (capitalized suitably) is not a perspective. He had his mercy on the horse but had he worked his way through like I have perhaps he would not have spent his final years as a scary monster in the attic, being trotted out as a spectacle of the inquiring public.

Certainly they will search for me but it will be a wild goose chase for a red herring. Show me the body! Behold the man! No body no crime, that’s my understanding. And I will have long since left the building. The first passerby will see a ship ghosting and after a thorough examination they will throw up their hands and the boat will rot in some dry dock on some island. But people love a good mystery story and I am always obliged to please the paying public.

I had my simple radio on and was listening to the BBC Test Matches. As I was making my umpteenth tape recording in came a message from the BBC, ever alert to a good show. It was all about congratulations, etc, and how they had a big televised spectacle awaiting me upon my return and they wanted my suggestions for how it might proceed. There was to be boats and helicopters galore and endless programming, and the Queen, and Knighthood perhaps (Sir Donald!); it was to be a real Hullo Folks extravaganza. In the future they will say that messages like this inadvertently were my Death Warrant but one should never believe half of what you hear in the press and I am in a charitable mood. Over the course of the next several days the messages from the network became ever more insistent, they were talking about rendezvous in the Azores to get everything ready but safe to say such a thing was not on my itinerary. I messaged back to Donald Kerr that any such meeting (which I had no intention of completing) must be observed by The Times so there was no question of me getting any unfair assistance. In this way I played the role of the strict enforcer of the race rules which was ironic as I had flagrantly broken every one of them. But as I told you at the beginning everyone always said that I liked playing games, funny games, and a man’s basic character never changes up to the end. If such an assertion will seem in hindsight to border on the breathtakingly devious, well so be it.

I recoded my words to Donald Kerr at midnight on June 21 1969, the Solstice exactly, the very height of the Invincible Sun. In some sixty hours I would begin cessation of the participation in the race, launch out on my philosophical speculations—what you are reading—or my psychotic delusions as they will be translated for the grannies in the rafters. I put on some clothes and made a tape in which I described myself in gay piece of toweling and a rigged sarong. I wryly relayed that I was looking rather the Sea Dandy and very gaudy and more than anything like a bird of paradise. And that it was perhaps the smallest sarong ever saronged but one learns to make due. I acted out taking a sun sight and pantomimed eating some flying fish. I also explained that after each film I would dutifully recorded the contents of the film in a written log so that were one ever to be destroyed there would be a back up.

It was in the wee hours of the next morning (June 22 1969 local time) that I at last got the reconstructed transmitter up and running. I was in an ecstatic mood and I was up all night congratulating myself and striking a heroic pose on tape: this (I told myself) is what makes the sailing of small boats so rewarding. It provides problems but problems which can be overcome with intelligence and hard work. The transmitters might be beyond the ken of some but to me it was a typical sort of problem. But it is a good indication of why people go sailing, all sorts of unforeseen and odd things crop up and they will tax one’s ingenuity. But there is nothing like coping and managing and overcoming difficulties. In fact right now, thinking of all the barriers and blockages I have so far surmounted, I am feeling pretty good about myself.

That night was a fine night (if I may slip for a moment into my Hemingway mode) and all seemed clear and good and true. Perfectly cool on a clam sea and phosphorescence streaming away from the ship, and my line streamed after creating yet another long phosphorescent streak that looked like nothing so much as the brightly colored tail of a comet. All agitation and inner turmoil had left me and my own preternatural calm mirrored that of my surroundings. Good Old England is a fine place to live but the Azores or the Canaries are like another world. And looking out at the sea I knew that now that I had finished messing with the transmitter I could get back home. A bit more sailoring and a bit more shoe polish and a bit more spurts of speed and I will be right as rain and will be cracking again. I would get the mainsail off and set off to some serious bashing and find out what I had in store.

But alas home I did not go home and the sailoring was at an end. My euphoria left me when I saw that just sending few more morse messages did not solve my problems; I spent the next day on the radio trying to link up with the BBC as the meeting place and trying to work out syndication contracts with my Press Agent; I badly wanted to speak with my wife (the last of fortune’s hostages) so I set about deconstructing the Shannon to make it capable of long range high frequency speech transmissions. But in this I failed; and I was not going very fast at all and all attempts at a homeward bound trek began to leave me cold; no, England (storied England) I would never see again, there was no place for me there, and all the ballyhoo about shows and books were just dust to me. I began to slow down. Exertion and work are a man’s natural abode but there comes a time when it must cease. I was entering the percipient calms of the Horse Latitudes with its variable winds. Strings of weed which I began to encounter told me that the eerie Sargasso Sea of fable was near; it was to be the final harbinger of things to come, when as our famous poet says, the wide world will start dreaming. A passing Spanish liner exacerbated my sense of isolation. It had altered course to let its passengers have good look at me, and I can only imagine that I must have been quite the sight. As it came nearby I could see up on the bridge many of them looking down at this curious animal before them and even from my distance I could hear the Spanish of a public address system blare the words presumably something on the order of look hence, there is a mad Englishmen in a single handed yacht on starboard hand, go up and take a look at him free of charge. Always a bit of a showman I am ever glad to do my small part for the pleasure, amusement, or bewilderment of the paying public and I smiled and waved and was waved to in turn. It’s the last anyone ever saw of me as far as I know.

In the increasing weed of the Sargasso I found a new pet to while away some time with. It was not a playful porpoise this time but a weird miniature sea monster. The little being had four vestigial limbs and each of these limbs had eight limbs for a total of some 32. They were folded around the back and were apparently designed to help in climbing or holding on to things. It was like a little lizard and had a most beautiful coloring of silver and blue. Underneath it was pale pink and its stomach was a tiny and hard pink nodule. Determining to keep it as a pet I put it in one of the Tupperware containers, which was a mistake. Left out in the sun I forgot about it and as it became hotter and hotter it turned for the worse. Coming upon it I realized what I had done and I changed the water and it came back to a little of life but the next day it was dead. But here is the funny part: over time he completely disappeared save for his stomach. There was still that pink part but not a trace of anything else. Certainly this little specter would make a fine subject for a chilling science fiction tale. Magnified all out of proportion he would have been the center of one of those weird tales which were so popular in England and America in the first half of this century. An HG Wells or someone of his ilk could have made it all very terrifying; people really go in for this sort of thing about the sea, the Kraken awakes, for I can tell you that what lies beneath is a rewarding theme out here, though what lies above baffles you too. But on the sea there is something very subliminal about the fear that there might be dark monstrosities lurking below and waiting for just the right moment to make their horrible presence felt—the Kraken! You know, unheard of things in the depth. Ha ha you say as you laugh. Ha ha. Those are children’s stories. But I can tell you such laughter does nothing to dispel the dark and uneasy feeling gnawing at the pit of one’s soul.

I must say that as I made the final leg of my journey to my home I felt very fit and healthy. Top of the world really and my reflexes razor sharp, it seems that I can catch things before they even start falling. In another world I could have realized my ambition to play top level cricket. I think of all those flabby men, those gray flannelled executives on Madison Avenue, if the whole pack of cards fell they would not know what to do. There is a great danger in the way we live now, so out of touch with nature, so ensconced in a purely human and artificial world. It just poisons us with sitting down and worrying. Consumed with our nearest competitor on the pyramid, the rat race! What with all the unhealthy foods we eat, and our constricted horizons, and our fake entertainments, I am sure we are all of us in great peril from it. Out on the sea you can get rid of all these poisons, and, as they say, find out who you really are. And what you find out most it that the mind is not such a delicate mechanism after all, it is not fragile or weak, but is a perfectly flexible and adaptable instrument which can handle any contingency if you let it work properly. Harking back to Strangelove they took all that bodily fluid stuff as a big joke but I tell you it is no joke. There are poisons out there. I do not know yet what these poisons are up to but they are there nonetheless and they poison our bodies and mind. And we must get rid of them in time.

Surely the fine salon set (fat book contracts in hand!) will say that these words are sadly (or gloomily or morbidly or morosely—pick your poison!) prophetic. They will say that the tape ran off at the spool even as I ran off the rails. Poppycock! The will say that within 24 hours I ceased to behave like a rational being which is utter nonsense. I for one have never seen anyone behave like a rational being—and for once I decided to be the exception. I did in fact cease to sail the boat and I let it drift listlessly into the Sargasso. The cares torment and vanities of the world ceased to have me in thrall. For when man hits a dead end the options begin to proliferate.

Once I had figured it out I tarried for a bit. I was to be the Drivel King after all and I wanted to anticipate all the means of the drivel the dregs would write about me. If madness it was (it was not) then what prey tell could have been the cause? Reality bearing down? A sudden realization of despair? Chemicals perhaps, drugs, liquor? Could there have been fungus in the cheese? Had to much thinking and idle time driven me insane? They will explore all of the extant possibilities but in the end they will invariably fall back on the one from which they derive the most assurance: that I was a man at wit’s end. They will say that I was driven batty by a nightmarish situation of ever dimming prospects, by loneliness and a hostile environment. The burden of having lied, my lack of hope, and the ever growing reminders that in two weeks time my destiny was none other than to go from the toast of the town to toast. There was no escape they will say, no possible egress, no way to retreat from looming reality. And of course they will speak of mental collapse and last straw and thorny predicaments. I will admit I was in a pickle, like one of those children’s game where the paper tube attaches to two fingers and as you try to get free it clamps all the tighter; or like a cat’s cradle which as you delve in become more labyrinthine by the second. They will speak of elemental quandaries and the dawning of the awareness that my deception could not succeed much longer, of how I had been so long willing my story to come true but then when the eventuality that I would turn into a pumpkin at the stroke of midnight became all too apparent I went off my head and landed the end of my rope and tether. That my ever more convoluted lies came back to haunt me I would become increasingly unable to be convinced of them and so my position would become untenable. Which is all rubbish of course, they say that it’s at wit’s end where the wisdom of God begins but that is the fairy story. There is no end to human intelligence, and in the billions of years of the universe no thing can match the human brain for it’s capabilities. It does have one fatal design flow though: for it to work one must use it.

I can see it now, it’s more than likely that Chichester is rallying the troops and getting ready to have a thoroughgoing look see at my books. But he shall never get his cold dying hands on them. The old bluffer, the old bastard—he can go to hell.

And that was the last of my ill will towards the world, I now wish it all the best. And anyway I was much more concerned with what I had done to the lizard. But past cure is past care and no one ever should cry over spilled milk. It was time now to disgorge my ruminations and so I sat down to transcribe great philosophical truths.

For the record it was June 24 1969, Midsummer Day, or so they say; I no longer believe them having just tossed all the clocks overboard.

Continued at Crow (Part Ten)

[Douglas Mercer]

[Douglas Mercer]

[Douglas Mercer]

Sargasso Sea is a strange area within the Bermuda Triangle that has no shores but is bounded by ocean currents on all sides. The Sargasso Sea is a region of the North Atlantic Ocean.

[Douglas Mercer]

[Douglas Mercer]

[Douglas Mercer]

[Douglas Mercer]

The Latin term corpus delicti refers to the principle that there must be some proof that a crime has been committed before a person can be convicted of having committed that crime. In Western law, the term has also been widely used to refer to the object upon which the crime was committed, meaning a body, in the case of a murder, which itself proves the crime was committed.

[Douglas Mercer]

[Douglas Mercer]